Italy-based Cubbit has gained a $12.5 million cash boost to extend its decentralized storage business in Europe, with data sovereignty and sustainability goals.
Decentralized or Web 3.0 storage – the Airbnb spare room rental approach to aggregating spare datacenter capacity and selling it as a storage cloud – is a lower cost alternative to classic AWS, Azure, GCP, Wasabi, etc., S3-style public cloud storage. Data is shared across storage drives in geo-distributed datacenters, with erasure coding or similar technology used to protect it and the Cubbit’s DS3 and Composer software managing the data’s distribution and access, customer and storage provider payments and so forth. There are more than 350 business customers, and Cubbit is supported by several international partners, including HPE, Equinix and Exclusive Networks.
Stefano Onofri, co-CEO and co-founder of Cubbit, said in a statement: “Having top-tier international VCs invest in Cubbit’s geo-distributed technology is a major endorsement. Over the past few years, we have grown massively and closed key partnerships and agreements with international players such as Leonardo, HPE, and Equinix – now it’s time to take our expansion to the next level.”
Cubbit was founded in 2016, took in a $2.3 million grant in 2019 and enjoyed an $8.3 million cash raise in 2021. It has been developing its business and management software since then, and says that, with its DS3 Composer software, it combines a proprietary data orchestration platform with data fragmentation and geo-distribution technologies. The claimed result is a sovereign, hyper-resilient, flexible, and highly cost-efficient cloud storage service that protects European data.
As Cubbit sees it, new funding will enable it to grow capex-free in Europe, piggybacking so to speak on existing datacenters – initially focusing on the DACH, and French-speaking regions, as well as the United Kingdom. Part of the funding will go towards further consolidation of the application ecosystem around Cubbit’s enabling technology to support vertical projects in various industries, including aerospace, defense, cyber security, healthcare and public administration.
There were multiple contributors to this funding round: eight new investors, three existing ones and two named individual investors, making 13 investing sources – quite a contrast with Silicon Valley VCs where you might expect fewer and larger funding sources in what is a relatively small funding event.
The round was co-led by LocalGlobe, EMEA’s number one VC investor according to the 2023 Dealroom report, and ETF Partners, said to be Europe’s original sustainability investor. New investors are Verve Ventures, 2100 Ventures, Hydra (holding of Datalogic), Growth Engine, Eurenergia and Moonstone.
Returning investors are Azimut Libera Impresa SGR, CDP Venture Capital SGR through its Fondo Evoluzione, and Primo Ventures. Individual investors include Fabio Fregi, former Italy Country Manager of Google Cloud, and Joe Zadeh, former VP product at Airbnb.
A statement from Alessandro Cillario, Cubbit’s co-CEO and co-founder, said: “Enterprises worldwide are facing the daunting challenge of orchestrating massive amounts of data – or they will soon. They don’t need just another cloud provider – they require a cloud enabler that allows them to implement the custom IT infrastructure strategy that they are looking for. Organizations need to keep full control over their data in order to simplify their workflows and reduce costs. Cubbit is here to help them achieve what was not possible before.”
Ferdinando Sigona, partner of LocalGlobe, said, “Data generation is already one of today’s steepest exponential curves, and the generative AI wave is only poised to accelerate this further. As a result, companies of all types and sizes are facing escalating complexity and cost. At the same time, the geopolitical environment is driving investment into AI sovereignty, and we actually think that need for control will extend down the stack, all the way to data storage.
“Cubbit’s cloud storage software elegantly addresses all of these needs, and we’re excited to back Stefano, Alessandro and the whole team as they respond to the intense pull they’re experiencing from the market.”
